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Dec 6, 2012

Potato, Cheddar, and Chive Torpedoes | BBA Bread #42

This is the second to last bread in the amazing book The Bread Baker's Apprentice by Peter Reinhart. It took me one year to bake the 43 recipes in the book (in order). If I hadn't committed to baking all of the breads in a row, I would have probably baked this bread right away.

See the cheese oozing out of the side of this loaf? So good.

At the end of the book, Peter included two recipes from Bennett Valley Bread and Pastry's Tim Decker who was Peter's head baker at Brother Juniper's Bakery in Santa Rosa.

These breads are ridiculously good. I wanted to hide these loaves and keep them to myself. They disappeared way too fast.

To make this bread, you must have a 100% ratio (water to flour) sourdough starter (referred to as barm in this recipe) that has been fed. There are plenty of recipes out there to make your own sourdough starter, some way more complicated than others. I actually bought a dehydrated starter from King Arthur Flour about three years ago. King Arthur flour also has a simple recipe for creating your own starter.

Each loaf includes 1/4 pound of boiled potatoes, and the water in the recipe is the water in which the potatoes were simmered. This makes it a very soft bread. The rest of the ingredients are bread flour, instant yeast, salt, chives, and slices of sharp cheddar cheese.

And I used my own home grown chives. Yay!

The only thing I would do differently is make the slashes deeper so that the cheese would ooze out of the top and make the crust more cheesy.

You can find the recipe here. You should also Google BBA Challenge #42 because there are many bakers who took step-by-step photos of how they baked this bread.